Miroslav Karić

Žolt Kovač : Stupid Paintings 4: the Children of Stupid Paintings

The artistic praxis of Žolt Kovač in the last two decades – the period he has been present and active on the scene – has been mostly marked by artist’s interest in topics regarding the constitutive definitions of art and creativity, the immediate system where they are developed and valorised, the status of an artwork, its reception in broader contexts and the position of the creator as a multiple mediator. With his first works Good and Bad Painting and Painting is Developing Supernatural Abilities, Kovač defined the directions of his future artistic research, where he would examine the afore mentioned topics to the present day in practical analyses of formal aspects and interpretative potentials of a classical painting medium, as well as the subtle critical examinations of communicative effects of art in general within the fluid character of contemporary time. In that sense, the legacy of abstract art, more precisely, of non-objective painting, has often been his conceptual departure and the chosen visual expression in his works where different problems lie in its focus, from his personal understanding of internal rules of the visual art language and the possibilities of their further conceptual workings to considerations of the constantly complex field of relations and interactions between an artwork and the observer. In that way, in the beginning, abstract painting functioned with Kovač as an element and content that could make interventions and intrusions in public space and discourse, and where its aesthetic and value unrecognition and unacceptance (Untitled 2001, Project Flux, Invisible Paintings) existed. The abstract painting in Kovač’s opus has sometimes been introduced from another side, as a gesture of humorous play with set rules and norms of the art world (Retrospective). Notwithstanding some works where he chose figuration to articulate the topics related to the phenomena of everyday social life and mass-media culture (Empty Time, Painting of Superfluous Information) abstraction did not remain for the artist only the space of direct stylistic-linguistic references, but became a research-analytical vehicle par exellence that helped one realise numerous issues of the present-day position of the medium of painting, and indirectly also the circumstances and methods in which the contemporary artistic system functions, as well as its constituent elements of exhibition and production, of theory and interpretation as well as market-related factors. From a reflection of historic examples in painting to his engagement in the nature of a digital painting (Screen Abstraction) Kovač has approached the concept and act of abstraction as an area of possibilities where certain phenomena, logic, order, state – could be critically cut, undermined, demystified, bared to absurdity, reduced or confronted with some simple but essential questions. On the other hand, in abstraction the artist has found the model of a certain expression and statement that otherwise slip away from the representationally expressive about the spirit of time, social phenomena, the dynamics of everyday, personal and professional life, the consequences left by the ever more rapid and immense flows of production and consumption and our daily transition from the sphere of the real into the virtual and vice versa. Significant in further considerations of Kovač’s conceptual strategies in art are the titles of his works, intoned by the author in a specific Dada-like manner of humorous associations, introducing them as a part of the game prepared for the observer, partially instructed by the syntagma of notions such as, for example, Simply Nothing, Stupid Paintings, Brilliant Paintings, Non-conceptualisation, but also confused and intrigued by their possible conflicts of meaning. Particularly indicative are the works Stupid Paintings and Non-conceptualisation, which, together with the newly presented works Return of Stupid Paintings in the Gallery “Reflektor” (Užice), More Returns of Stupid Paintings Kolarac Gallery and the current group of works Stupid Paintings 4: the Children of Stupid Paintings, in the Gallery RIMA, make up an artistic project in instalments. The first from the mentioned series of works, Stupid Paintings, was produced in 2009, when Kovač, “with references to banality as a dominant signifier of public life, examined in painting the possibilities of banalising the creation of a painting” , and the result was a new thematic opus developed by the artist consistently in the last decade and treated from diverse aspects, simultaneously devoting his time to experiments in the painterly praxis. The artist justifies his Stupid Paintings whose undefined, multicoloured forms are randomly arranged on aluminium foundation with his desire to produce “something equally unnecessary and banal” , just as the present media reality is flooded with dappled, superfluous but attractive contents that would be gradually articulated in the formal-stylistic and conceptual sense through his study of the potential of abstract visual language as a critical gesture in contemporary, artistic and social contexts. The compositions of Stupid Paintings, where he had introduced abstraction in order to achieve and transfer, in an undefined relationship and coordinated action of visual art elements, the impression of the superfluous and insipid content served to us through the media every day, Kovač began to develop further in his new works of similar provenance. He structured those elements by a series of overlapping and contrasted patterns of diverse forms and loud colours. The next change arrived with artist’s ever more frequent experiments in techniques and materials, more precisely with his application of sprays and models on the canvas; these became an important part of his research in testing the limits of abstract expression or more concretely its openness to permanent deconstructions and transformations of the objective and the mimetic. The possibility to play within the space of an abstract painting with the existing, or to create some other, rules, to organise and lead its internal logic and order through a controlled procedure or even surrender to accident without any premeditation, inspired Kovač to use every new work to initiate or restart the key issues about how we perceive art, the premises of artistic creation, the value factors and, particularly, the position that the medium of classical painting holds today in the era of ever more complex and saturated visual reality. In that sense, the current group of works Stupid Paintings 4: the Children of Stupid Paintings continues artist’s considerations regarding the phenomenon of banality as a potential critical and subversive gesture and strategy in demystifying art, its conventions, determined value categories and the usual patterns of communication with the world outside art. This time, Kovač goes one step further in his characteristic humorous provocations and turns to elaborate the abstract visual expression, and so, he begins to defragment his “stupid paintings”, organised in web-like structures of multicoloured spots produced by spraying the neutral surface of the canvas separating their individual constituent parts. The spots created by different thrusts of spray and their interaction with the canvas, lined up in coloristic horizontals or verticals, or even abstracted from the whole, impress one in their final arrangement with the artist’s desire to reveal the reality of a painting to its smallest measure unit, notwithstanding the register of our use or consumption.